


Arrow Straight, Arrow True

by Interrobam



Category: Brave (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet, Community: disney_kink, Disabled Character, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-12
Updated: 2012-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-12 00:45:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrobam/pseuds/Interrobam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merida was an archer by passion and a swordswoman by blood, but her father had both blood and passion in his hands when he lowered his blade to the head of his wife. Merida was youthful, and recently arrogant, so she drew her own weapon and readied her nerves. Yet Fergus had fought vikings, mercenaries, bears of legend: when he struck the blow his daughter was too slow and unpracticed to block it. She was felled like a sapling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arrow Straight, Arrow True

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: Abelist language, prejudices.
> 
> Written for the Disney Animated Kink Meme. Diverges from canon at the scene where Fergus discovers Elinor in Merida's room.

Merida was an archer by passion and a swordswoman by blood, but her father had both blood and passion in his hands when he lowered his blade to the head of his wife. Merida was youthful, and recently arrogant, so she drew her own weapon and readied her nerves. Yet Fergus had fought vikings, mercenaries, bears of legend: when he struck the blow his daughter was too slow and unpracticed to block it. It cut through the flesh of her arm clean and deep: he had put in enough thrust to split an animal's skull and despite all her years in the forest, all her muscle, she was felled like a sapling. Fergus pushed her aside and prepared another strike. Elinor smelled the blood, she knew that her child had been hurt, and the magic that kept her dumb broke easily beneath the fury she felt. She lunged. Fergus readied his sword. Merida felt the scream that followed deep in her injured bones.

“Mum.” Merida sobbed, like a child afraid of thunder, on the floor where her father had thrown her. “Mum.” She called, staring up at the shadows on her ceiling. She felt a lifting, a numbness altered, as Fergus took her up in his arms. 

“It's alright Merida.” 

“Mum.” If she kept calling there would be an answer, if she kept trying her father's chest would not be splattered in her mother's blood, if she kept fighting the wisps would lead her somewhere else, the witch would come back and lift the curse. Something would happen. Something other than this.

“Your mother's at peace now.” The Princess cried against her father's shoulder, unable and unwilling to explain to him what he had done. Unable to tell him that her body was not inside the bear, not as he thought it was. Unable to confess to her crimes. He carried her out into the hall, gave her to Maudie. He could not see her wounds with all the carnage already upon him. It was only when the flickering light of the lamps touched her skin, and the red blood glimmered like gemstones on her sleeve, that she herself realized how limply, how numbly her hand hung by her side. After that her memories lost sequence. Pain, screaming. Wine in her mouth. Maybe it was her scream, maybe Maudie's. She was on the floor, the kitchen table, there was a fire going that burned at her face. Her hair was in her vision, pulled back tight. Her mother's skin being flayed off of her body. Screaming pain. Something gone, yelling, on the floor again, warm with the fire. Cold water on her face. Her father the murderer touching her somewhere she couldn't feel. Wine in her mouth: good wine, the wine of the dying. Bubbling in her throat, screaming, her hair caught, the fire on her arm, vague fingers. Cold water making her dress stick to her skin. The comfort of darkness.

Merida woke up groggily, woke up with her body hot and tense. The room was dark, with a single lamp in the corner. She could make out her father's massive shadow on a chair nearby. There were bandages on her arm, her arm that stopped unfamiliarly short, and everything swum in and out of reality. She held her wound, the stump of her arm under the elbow, to her chest, and rocked herself back to sleep as she would imagine her mother might have.

She healed slowly, but she healed nonetheless. On the first day that she awoke full and lucid they tried to feed her a stew. She took one bite. Bear. She spat her mother's flesh onto her sheets and sobbed until they gave her bread and wine and the blessing of sleep. The next time they knew better. They brought her rabbit and she ate it voraciously, bare handed. She asked after her father. He was brought to her room, looking a hundred years older than she remembered him.

“You're doing well lass. I was afraid I'd lost you too, you know.” Merida looked away from him, away from the arm she no longer had.

“How are the boys?” The King's face grew dark.

“Gone.”

“Gone?” She turned her head sharply “What do you mean _gone_?”

“Mor'du took everything from me.” His face turned to her's, it was weathered and afraid “Everything but you.” Merida looked pointedly, painfully, at the still raw stump pressed close to her stomach. 

“An archer without an arm.” She whispered “I might as well be dead.” When Fergus spoke again, his voice was soft.

“You don't need two arms to be my daughter.”

“Your daughter the cripple.” Fergus had always been bad with words, with comfort and decorum, and he only shrugged in response. Merida turned over: tried to feign sleep. The way her shoulders shook with sobs rendered her ruse transparent.

A few days later Fergus set off on a quest into the woods. Merida pressed her cheek to the thin stone slat of her window and watched him as he set off on his journey. Maudie came in with a bowl of rabbit stew, pressed her hand to the Princess' forehead.

“The Lords and their sons wish to bid you goodbye.”

“I'm not moving from this room.”

“Don't you want to go outside again?” The maid pressed, placing the bowl on her bedside table. “Don't you miss it?”

“...You miss the boys, don't you?” Maudie pursed her lips tightly, her eyes shifted.

“Aye, often.” She put her arm to Merida's shoulder. “But I owe it to them, you owe it to them, to continue on. To keep them in your memory.” The Princess heard these words like a stinging salve. She closed her eyes tight, half felt her half arm.

“Alright.” She pushed herself out of bed slowly, her legs were numb from so much rest, and allowed her maid to lead her into the hall, past the door, to the docks. The Lords were polite, they pointedly avoided her shortened arm as they had never avoided her father's shortened leg. Their sons were less polite, but far more understanding. They thanked her for her company, her diplomacy. They promised years of loyalty from their clan, they wished her health. No one spoke of her mother, her brothers, the bear. She was both hurt and grateful for their subtlety, her head a storm of mourning and fury. The wind blew her hair wildly: into and out of her vision, it refused to behave itself.

At least something was still the same as before.

Her father returned a few weeks later, after she had learned to laugh again, to eat again, to find a few minutes in her day when she was not reminded of her fractured family. He brought something in a box, from a kingdom far afield from them. It was an artificial arm, carved from wood with leather straps. It had hands, three of them, which could be screwed into its wrist. He badgered her into giving him her limb, into allowing him to strap the device to her. It was heavy, unresponsive, and Merida's first instinct was to pull it off of her. Her father was so eager, so pleased, that she resisted the urge and allowed him to show her her new hands. One with a protruding, hooked rod of metal. One with two sharp, forked iron fingers. One with three wires, smooth and bent inward. 

“For archery.” Fergus' voice was wheedling, expectant. Merida stubbornly refused to react, to hope. She took her new arm off, returned it to it's box.

“Now now, how do you know its not worth a try?” He had lost so much, he had destroyed so much, that the Princess could hardly bear to look at him. 

“You can't understand.”

“Can't understand? You don't see my leg, you don't think I know how it feels? Merida-”

“It's different.” She longed to tell him everything, the entire bloody legend, but she knew it would sound like the ravings of a woman gone mad. He had no faith in witches, in wisps. The only thing keeping him whole was the belief he had avenged his sons and wife, the belief that he could repair his broken daughter. Beliefs she could not, would not shatter. Yet she could not bear either to take up the arm he had traveled so far to procure for her, to try its dexterity. She had been such a foolish girl, such an arrogant girl. It was her wish that killed her mother, she felt this as a truth deep in her heart. She was guiltier even than her father, with his sword in his wife's chest and her flesh in his belly. She did not deserve to shoot anymore. She did not deserve to regain what she had lost. She kept her mouth shut.

“Just _try_ it.” His voice was too soft, too weak. It embarrassed her to be spoken to with it.

“Fine.” She spat, seizing the box from him and cradling it to her chest. “Later.”

That night she tossed and turned: haunted by half formed dreams, half formed apologies, she awoke a dozen times to find the moon high in the sky. Finally, bitterly, she took her spare bow from under her bed and clumsily secured her arm, her screwed on hand. She hooked the wires around the bowstring, pulled it taught. It was a difficult task, she felt once more like the girl she was on her birthday long ago. A girl just tangling with her first bow. She practiced nocking her arrows until sunrise came. She was too afraid to let them fly.

After another week of gloomy silences at the breakfast table, another week of nights spent feverishly awake and readying to fire, she felt hubris build in her chest. Her old arrogance was recovering slowly, scarred though it was, and she felt swift again, strong again. She snuck out to the shooting range at twilight, a quiver of arrows at her back, and nocked one in a way that was nearly natural again. It took her a few minutes to remember that her fingers would not uncurl for her, to remember her wounds. Letting her bow become limp, she studied her new hand. A twist of her elbow and the string should release. Merida corrected her arrow, set her eyes to the target. She fired. The arrow fell crooked, weak, and short: it stuck into the grass before the target. The princess screamed into the sky.

It was a few days until she felt she could try again. She was not afraid of work, not afraid of challenge. She was terrified, to her bones, of failure. She was terrified that without her arm, without her bow, she was no longer herself. She felt her flesh, her reflection, to be a stranger in her midst. She awoke one morning: tired of crying, of mourning, of hating her body. She walked past the hall, her father having breakfast, with two quivers stuffed full hanging off of her shoulders. Taking her stance, nocking her arrow, she readied herself for a long day.

She had let loose an entire quiver before she even grazed the target. She swallowed the yelp that rose within her, berated herself for her own enthusiasm. It could have easily been a fluke. She shot six more, missed six more, the ground before and long past the target were scarred like a battlefield. The seventh arrow of the second quiver she held in her hand for a long while. She closed her eyes, pressed the arrow to her lips.

“Please.” She whispered, desperate and faithful, before setting the arrow.

Slowly, carefully, she breathed out, twisted her elbow just so. She could feel the string release, the kiss of air against her cheek, the arrow flying free. It hit the target, buried itself in the straw. It was an inch or two away from the bullseye, but she didn't care. It didn't matter. If she could shoot, she could heal. If she could hit a target, she could be Merida again. She could forgive herself for her mother's death, the loss of her brothers, the weak voice Fergus used with her. She yelped joyously at the cold blue sky, throwing up her arms, the one of flesh and one of wood, together.

Years later the princess rides through the forest. Her old targets, their friendship rekindled, welcome her precise shots. Angus is long retired, but his son carries her just as faithfully, knows her habits just as thoroughly. She rides beside the stone circle, down the witch's valley, to the stream she had slept by nearly ten years prior. Angus' son starts, spooks, as she approaches the water, and she draws her bow back, holds the string with her wire fingers effortlessly. There are three bears there: juveniles, males from their shape and size. She aims at the closest one, growling at her from the edge of the falls, and makes ready to fire

Something comes to her. Her brothers, the cake, the promise she made them in the kitchens all those years ago. She lowers her bow, nods her head faintly.

“Boys?” The bears stare back with cold black eyes. Then, slowly, they turn and leave. Merida feels an ache in her heart, the scar of a scream in her bones, a tragedy on the fringe of her family's tapestry. Merida feels a private disaster, a call to her mother at the back of her throat, hot moisture at the edge of her eyes.

She buries it deep inside of her.


End file.
